Margo Timmins looked over at the lovely bouquet of fresh-cut flowers that sat next to her onstage on Tuesday night (July 18) and thanked the fans who sent it to her.
“I wish I had a happy song to sing for you,” said the vocalist, who then added with her traditional self-effacing deadpan humor: “But there really is nothing.”
And that was perfectly OK with the listeners who filled the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley for the first of two sold-out shows by the Cowboy Junkies. They didn’t buy tickets to hear radio-friendly joyous ditties, but rather to be run — once again — through the emotional ringer in ways that are both devastating and transformative.
They came for a dose of “Such Ferocious Beauty” — which is the title of the Junkies’ most recent album, but also as accurate a description as one will find of the band’s music.
The group’s two-hour performance was filled with absolutely gorgeous music, centered around Margo Timmins’ intensely emotive interpretations of her brother Michael’s lyrics. Yet, the music was also achingly sad, soaked in longing, regret and, more than anything else, quiet desperation. It’s that disparity between delivery and content that makes the Junkies’ music so impossible to resist.
The Canadian outfit — which features Margo Timmins and her brothers Michael (guitar) and Peter (drums), as well as bassist Alan Anton and longtime touring multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird — kicked off the first of two sets with a powerful run through Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” which can be found on the Junkies’ 2022 all-covers album, “Songs of the Recollection.”
The group next offered up it’s best-known cover — and overall most popular song — the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” a hypnotic, slowed-down version that the tune’s author, Lou Reed, reportedly adored.
Then came time to sell some new albums.
“Well, we are back on the road again,” Margo Timmins told the crowd. “And we are out here doing what we’re always doing — trying to sell records. We’ve got a new one — ‘Such Ferocious Beauty’ — so we are going to push that one on you.
“‘Ferocious Beauty’ is a Junkies album so it’s not any happier than the other ones.”
The group quickly underscored that statement by playing the album’s opening track, “This Is What I Do,” which is written about the Timmins siblings’ father, who died not long ago after a long battle with dementia.
“I woke up this morning, didn’t know who I was,” Margo Timmins sang. “I looked at the room, I didn’t know where I was.
“Or if I ever was.”
Following two more new tunes — “Circe and Penelope” and “Hard to Build, Easy to Break” — the Cowboy Junkies ventured back to 1990’s brilliant album “The Caution Horses” for a powerful rendition of “Where Are You Tonight?” and closed the set with yet another cool cover, the David Bowie gem “Five Years” from 1972’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”
The group opened the second set with “The Things We Do to Each Other” — a key cut from 2020’s superb “All That Reckoning — and then took a turn to the bright side of life (at least by Junkies’ standards) with the joyous tour travelogue “Townes’ Blues” and the self-affirming “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning”
Having hit their quota of happy for the night — and, perhaps, for the entire tour — the Junkies returned to more familiar territory with the simmering anguish of “Postcard Blues” and the painful nostalgia of Townes Van Zandt’s “Rake.”
The group sounded great, as always, with Anton and Peter Timmins setting the steady, mesmerizing rhythm while Michael Timmins and Bird provide the fret board fireworks. Bird is a true ace, performing on a variety of instruments, including harmonica, mandolin and, as Margo Timmins puts it, “the shaky things.”
Then there’s Margo Timmins, who used the Freight & Salvage showcase to show once again that she possesses one of the most effective voices in pop music history.
The whole package was amplified, in all the right ways, by the setting, which ranks high among the best sounding rooms in all of California.
The Cowboy Junkies finished the second set with three of their very-best songs — “Bea’s Song (River Trilogy Part II),” “’Cause Cheap Is How I Feel” and “Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park” — as well as the longtime favorite “Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis).”
Thankfully, a two-song encore followed, consisting of “Good Friday” — which may well have been the most powerful song of the night — and the Patsy Cline staple “Walkin’ After Midnight.”
Setlist
Set 1
1. “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”
2. “Sweet Jane”
3. “What I Lost”
4. “Circe and Penelope”
5. “Hard to Build, Easy to Break”
6. “Where Are You Tonight”
7. “Five Years”
Set 2
8. “The Things We Do to Each Other”
9. “Townes’ Blues”
10. “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning”
11. “Postcard Blues”
12. “Rake”
13. “Bea’s Song (River Trilogy Part II)”
14. “’Cause Cheap Is How I Feel”
15. “Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park”
16. “Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis)”
Encore
17. “Good Friday”
18. “Walkin’ After Midnight”
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